The South Dakota Board of Minerals and Environment steps into the frying pan next week. The BME hold a hearing in Pierre beginning Monday on the air quality permit for the proposed Hyperion oil refinery in Union County. A number of groups who oppose this project, including the Sierra Club, Save Union County, and Citizens Opposed to Oil Pollution, are bringing in Chicago law firm Jenner & Block to help make their case to Pierre that Hyperion poses too much risk to air quality and not enough economic necessity to justify handing Hyperion a permit to bring smog to Elk Point.
If you'd like to learn more about the case against Hyperion, refinery opponents are holding a press conference tomorrow (Thursday, July 21) at the downtown Sioux Falls Public Library at 10:30 a.m.
At the beginning, when they still claimed to be green, Hyperion applied for a permit to build a refinery and 'anything else they decided to build later' without saying what they would build. They also routinely stated that they would have a power plant since refinerys have power plants,(assumed that we knew refineries do even though they do not). Recently they had a new employee from the east coast who apperently did not know they had been saying this and he had a my voice in the Argus Leader that admitted that power plants were not typical. But I had always wondered what they would do with the tar from the tar sands. Tar does not refine into gasoline. But if it is burned in a power plant there would be a use for it. They have huge lakes of left over tar at the refineries in Alberta with no use for it. Then after they propose a tar power plant the Big Stone II plant gets dropped. So we need to find out how much polution tar gives us when burned in a power plant.